Caitlin Johnstone: Israel’s War on Journalism

Israel keeps attacking Al Jazeera, assassinating journalists and bombing press offices for the same reason the mafia kills witnesses. They want to commit their crimes in the dark.

Protect Journalists in Palestine — End Israel-U.S. Impunity march in San Francisco in May. (Peg Hunter, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com.au

Listen to Tim Foley reading this article.

Israel has continued its war on journalism with another attack on Al Jazeera, this time with a raid on the outlet’s office in the West Bank and an order to shut down for 45 days. 

The shuttering occurred despite the office being legally under Palestinian control per the Oslo Accords.

This move comes as Israel and Hezbollah exchange heavy fire and step closer to the brink of full-scale war, and as Israel continues its daily massacres in Gaza and keeps ramping up its brutality toward Palestinians in the West Bank. 

Israel keeps attacking Al Jazeera, assassinating journalists and bombing press offices for the same reason the mafia kills witnesses. They want to commit their crimes in the dark.

Journalist Jonathan Cook writes of the news:

“Having destroyed Al Jazeera’s office in Gaza, and killed much of its staff there,

having outlawed Al Jazeera from broadcasting in Israel,

having admitted executing Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh (after lying that Palestinians did it),

Israeli troops have now invaded Al Jazeera’s office in the West Bank city of Ramallah, supposedly under the control of the Palestinian Authority, and shuttered the channel’s operations.

This is the latest attack on journalism by Israel: over the past year, it has killed more than 170 journalists, most of them Palestinians, and barred all foreign correspondents from reporting from Gaza.

When will the US and UK proscribe Israel as a terrorist state?

When will western media organisations and western journalists speak up in solidarity with their terrorised colleagues in occupied Palestine?”

Israel hates truth. 

Israel hates truth for the same reason anyone has ever hated truth: because the truth about them is ugly.

The more I live and learn the more convinced I am that everything ultimately comes down to seeing. Clear perception is what moves things toward health, and the lack of clear perception is what keeps things in dysfunction.

The more clear perception there is, the more things move out of dysfunction and toward health. This is true whether you’re talking about your own personal psychology, or the largest power dynamics in the world.

This is why profoundly ugly governments like Israel and the United States constantly attack the press, churn out propaganda, manipulate narratives, participate in online information ops, use censorship, and obstruct visibility via government secrecy.

The truth about them is so ugly, that they devote a lot of work to preventing the truth from being seen.

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This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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5 comments for “Caitlin Johnstone: Israel’s War on Journalism

  1. Vera Gottlieb
    September 25, 2024 at 12:11

    So…WHO??? are the animals, Netan-yahoo???

  2. wildthange
    September 24, 2024 at 18:47

    Western civilization cannot hide its moral, religious and economic vacuum in a system dedicated to full spectrum dominance by permanent war technology and arms race as the boom, bomb and bust economic cycle throughout history
    The military protection racket of NATO is takeover our hypocritical asylum of maximizing profits of doom. .

  3. September 24, 2024 at 16:47

    Please Note: There was also a TikTok video early today of an al Jazeera reporter about to go on the air when the building was hit by a bomb which blew him over his desk and toward the camera screaming and then falling out of the picture and going mute, presumably because he was either unconscious or dead. Very frightening and diabolical stuff indeed!! The video my still be up TikTok, or, if not, on X.

  4. SH
    September 24, 2024 at 16:23

    In any contest between perception of truth and truth, perception almost always wins, which is why we must always tune our perceptions as close as possible to the truth …

  5. September 24, 2024 at 13:39

    Truth outs.
    Thank you.

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